


lord lord mother; lord listen lover

by isozyme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Illustrated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-15
Packaged: 2017-12-11 22:32:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/803987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isozyme/pseuds/isozyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i></i><br/>It’s Nepeta’s turn to wait up, when Terezi doesn’t come back at dawn.  She curls up in front of the fireplace, and oversugars her tea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lord lord mother; lord listen lover

 

  
_lord lord mother we are all losing love_   
_lord listen lover we are all missing mama_   
_lord lord mother we are all losing love_   
_lord listen lover we are all missing something i don’t got_   


* * *

_  
_

It’s Nepeta’s turn to wait up, when Terezi doesn’t come back at dawn. She curls up in front of the fireplace, and oversugars her tea.

Kanaya keeps the patrol rotation pinned above the hearth and will suffer no alterations to her chosen order, because she is the least subject to the whims of heroism. After the Blueblood Massacre, Kanaya kept charge of the list by sleeping with it, face pillowed in her arms on the scarred-up table in front of the fire, vigilant. You had just arrived, then, confused and freshly dead, bruises blooming luminescent around your neck.

They’re almost out of sugar, which is one of the few things they keep well-stocked. It has been a long time since they had very much sopor at all, for instance, but sopor does not go well in tea, and they need the small, humanizing pleasures of tea and sweetcakes more than peaceful sleep. There are only two recuperacoons up the slanted ladder-stairs, and the sopor is cut so far with isopropanol that they steam with heady vapors even on colder days. Nepeta grew them herself from bluebottle larvae and growth hormones, chattering about how best to outfit a cave while her small sure hands pressed the cocoons into shape.

Aradia comes down before the sky has had time to go purple with dawn, which makes Nepeta spring up and shuffle things around on the table so there is space for two cups of tea.

They all live under one roof; they share sopor and washcloths and dead friends. Kanaya lets Nepeta clean her chainsaw, and change the oil when it needs it. Terezi and Aradia like to lean by the stove to count each other’s scars, lithe Terezi bundled up in slick leather against the dim season chill and Aradia’s broad shoulders bare under a thin tank top, and Terezi’s the only one who ever laughs, but sometimes Aradia smiles. They share ghosts, too, although they do not know it; they share you, even though you are, in the majority, Aradia’s burden.

Aradia ignores Nepeta until she puts tea in her hands, unsweetened and oversteeped like she likes it. The tea distracts Aradia from her morning ritual of staring into nothing, and she pats Nepeta’s head between her horns in thanks. Nepeta squirms out from under her claws, blushing.

There’s an unwritten house rule: no fucking, as clear as Kanaya’s schedule pinned over the hours, but nobody says anything about no pity. Nepeta’s got old wounds there, ones you’ve guessed at, so she ducks under the table, where it feels safer.

Aradia retreats to sink down onto the slatted steps that lead up to where Kanaya -- just Kanaya, Terezi is still out on patrol -- is sleeping.

“Where do you think she is?” Nepeta asks, but Aradia shakes her head.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Aradia says, soft and low. Nepeta growls a little, flashes her teeth so they gleam in the dark under the table. “Oh hush,” Aradia says, and Nepeta flushes again, slurps her tea.

“Let’s play a game,” Aradia suggests.

“Not whist,” Nepeta says, because Aradia says she doesn’t cheat, but she cheats. “Let’s play Captain.”

Captain has very simple rules. When they play Captain their little cellar block is a starship, and the captain tells the helmsman where they are and what it is like outside. Nepeta likes to play with Terezi, mostly, especially when there’s a drone sweep and they have to turn off the heating on their recuperacoons and huddle inside to mask their heat signatures, two to a ‘coon. Drone sweeps last for two days, which is a long time to stay submerged. The helmsman can win if she asks a question that the captain can’t answer. The captain can’t win; the captain just plays.

“Where are we going, Captain?” Aradia asks.

Nepeta sets her teacup down on the floor, next to her saucer, and twists them like they’re dials on her command bridge, back and forth while she thinks of a nice place. “There’s a planet in the third ancestral solar cluster that the empire never conquered,” Nepeta says. “We have a hull filled with contraband laser pistols and an engine on the fritz! Our smuggling ship will make port there to shake the empress’s dogs; they’ll never find us here!”

Aradia leans back and stretches her legs out, an invitation for Nepeta to come over and perch on her lap. Nepeta’s quivery with tension and you feel the same thing Aradia’s feeling, albeit drawn thin and watery like all emotions of the dead, the desire to smooth over Nepeta’s thorny edges and make your heart her home. You and Aradia are disgustingly alike, even now.

Nepeta stays under the table. It’s her captain’s quarters, and she needs to protect her carefully doctored ship’s logs and ledgers.

“Do they catch us?” Aradia asks.

“No!” Nepeta says. “We crash, horribly, and the ship is ruined, but our cargo is safe. If only we could contact our potential buyer, but our radio is all kinds of busted. The empire thinks we are dead, and good riddance, because we are terrible troublemakers.”

“Why hasn’t this planet been conquered?”

Nepeta chews her lip a little, not certain and not ready to lose the game just yet, then says, “Because it’s secret.”

“How’s it secret?”

“There’s clouds,” Nepeta says. “There’s clouds of acid rain, half of the year, when the oceans spit up storms and storms. And during the storms everyone stays inside, so they’re safe, and the empire’s scouting instruments were eaten by the biting clouds faster than they could send pictures back! They thought the planet was dead and uninhabitable. But the stinking yellow seas crust over during the summer, so it’s safe to come out again.”

Aradia smiles. “Did we land during summer?”

“Yep! Lucky, huh? ‘Cause it’s a secret among all the people the empress wants to kill, everyone knows so long as the clouds are bright, perfect white instead of sick yellow you can hide there and the empire will think you’ve crashed and died. They gave up scouting it years ago, they think it’s a trap but it’s not! It’s full of aliens and trolls and thieves and revolutionaries all in giant underground cities, and everybody gets along. We ditch our buyer and sell all the laser pistols here instead, and use the money to convert the ship into a big house with a shop in the front, acid-proofed and everything, and then we become really rich arms dealers. Do you think you’d like that?”

“I would like that a lot,” Aradia says, so Nepeta comes out and sits by her feet. It’s a good story this time. Nepeta likes it when Captain turns out to have a nice ending, with lots of swashbuckling and pirates; most of her stories turn cheerful halfway through. “What’s this ship called?” Aradia asks, being indulgent.

Terezi never would have asked that question, but Aradia’s distance means she hasn’t learned Nepeta’s soft spots yet. Nepeta doesn’t answer; when Nepeta plays Captain the ship is always called Zahhak.

 

 

*

Everyone knows about the Many Selves of Aradia Megido, how you numbered in thousands and all looked the same. She used to pin scraps of cerulean fabric over your hatchsigns, and you harnessed the daywalkers to wreak havoc in the twilight. More bluebloods died by your many hands than a whole sweep’s worth of casualties in the colonial wars. The Megidos are all dead now, save for one; you went to the gallows in Aradia’s stead, your horns sawn off in prison as a mark of shame and anonymity. You regret it, and that drives your haunting.

Aradia won’t tell Nepeta, but you are both waiting to see Terezi’s ghost. It’s midday, and Terezi should have an advantage getting back, without need to worry about her sight.

Aradia’s also waiting for the empire to eat itself from the inside out, in the sick sort of way one sits watching a hurricane and hopes that this time it’ll hit the big costal city. There’s no newsfeeds in the cellar, but for the last several hours Aradia’s been sitting on the steps, watching Nepeta drilling claw-strikes against a weighted sandbag that she hung from the rafters, alternating between furious nervous energy and precisely timed, prowling strikes.

You stand at Aradia’s side and track Nepeta’s movements, wincing every time Nepeta misses a blow or slams into the bag too hard and slips. _She wants you to lead a rescue,_ you say. _But you won’t._

Aradia doesn’t even twitch. You’ve hated her from the moment they cut you down from the gallows. You’ve hated her ever since she turned her back on your body and you watched her bow her head to Terezi and say _it wasn’t ever even worth anything, was it?_

Nepeta falls particularly hard on her wrist and yelps, shaking it out and scowling thunderously at everything. The noise finally draws Kanaya down from upstairs. She’s fully dressed, even though the hour is ungodly -- a clean shirt with the sleeves folded neatly up to her forearms and crisply pressed pants. The noontime light biting through the cracks in the ceiling makes the dark circles under her eyes look worse than they are. You can see the rainbow drinker part of her -- the dead part of her -- a little, but it is constrained by the clothing she wears, tamed by tie-pins and the neat lines of suspenders crossing her back. Nepeta unclips the claws from her knuckles and goes to put on another kettle of tea, and shrugs an apology to Kanaya as she slinks past.

“Nothing?” Kanaya asks, settling down at the table. “Of course nothing,” she answers for herself.

Nepeta slides a teacup in front of Kanaya and stands behind her own chair, claws kneading at the back of it and kicking up splinters. “If Terezi can’t get back, we should try--” Nepeta says.

“No,” Aradia says.

“Why not!” Nepeta wails. “It’s daytime, it’s safe now. What if she’s hurt?” Nepeta’s scraping long lines into the chair now, pale over a darker lattice of old anxious scratches.

“It’s not safe. We have to keep watch here.” Kanaya says.

“You’re always going to say that,” Nepeta says. “I can go alone, though, I know the route. She can’t be far.”

“No,” Aradia says, again, and rises slowly so that she can position herself between Nepeta and the door. “If someone doesn’t come back from patrol, we stand vigil for them. That’s how it is. No heroes.” The rules are Kanaya’s, laid down in an array of artificial self-preservation for trolls who don’t have much left to lose but each other. There’s not much space between self-sacrifice and not wanting to live anymore; when they’d holed up here, a broken little clan of four, Kanaya had walled off both options.

Nepeta bolts for it anyway, trying to duck around Aradia, but Aradia gets her by the loose skin at the back of her neck, fingers closing around messy hair and cool greenblood skin. “Fuck you,” Nepeta yowls. Aradia doesn’t strain to hold Nepeta, who squirms but keeps her fists and nails to herself. She is loud, though. “You’ve been the big rebel hero, you shot down a helicopter and tore the arm off of a drone and nobody told you to be safe. I know you love Terezi as much as we do! You love her and you _always wanted_ to go out like this.”

 _Not anymore, Moltov Megido,_ you say in her ear.

“I wanted to be an archeologist,” Aradia says, which shocks Nepeta silent.

The kettle whistles and Kanaya gets up to fix more tea. Nepeta goes back to her chair, eyes on Aradia the whole time, waiting for more explanation like it will paint her a picture of their current life that holds less pain. When Kanaya slides a cup in front of Aradia it reeks of grain-alcohol.

“There are forty-three dead moons in the planetary index that used to have intelligent life,” Aradia says. “Most of them that had an atmosphere lost it to burning stars, and it takes the terraforming crews sweeps and sweeps to fix that sort of thing, if they want to put a colony there. It’s long, boring work, but there’s a couple hundred posts for scienterrorists on a moon while they do it, for learning about who used to live there before they cover it all up with hives and moon-to-space bases.”

“I applied to every program they had before ascension. There’s a stipend, a little one, funded by colonial taxes -- they think that if we dig deep enough we can find out what mistakes lead to a the atmosphere sizzling away under starfire, or that we can unearth some new technological tricks. Suborganic processing cores are supposed to have come from one of those dead moons. The profits off of that still fund a couple of scholarships.”

Aradia takes a long sip of Kanaya’s tea. “They don’t have too many applicants. There’s not lots of trolls who want to hear about brachycephalic tunicates or silt stratification. Every scientist they bring out there is moirailed to their work. Apparently the dust gets right into your think-pan and makes you dusty too.”

“What happened?” Nepeta asks, and Kanaya is shaking her head already.

“You can live on with a project like that, in the names of things. But it’s not worth bringing rustbloods out there; we die too quick, never make it to the end of a longitudinal study,” Aradia says. “I didn’t get in.”

You think you would have liked to live on a dead moon, embedded in dry red mud riverbeds with the artificial crackle of research drone communications to keep you company instead of the snap of the hearth. Classification would be a better form of immortality than haunting. Aradia falls silent and you reach out to touch her hair, at the nape of her neck where you think it would be soft.

 

 

*

What they have is only borrowed time, here in the little cellar, half-buried under a collapsed hive-stack. Kanaya and Aradia are uncommonly strong, strong enough to pitch load-bearing walls as easy as grub-scouts cobbling together a tent. They slowed the crumble of this patch of the slums, while Terezi and Nepeta painted the walls with bright murals and hung votive candles so they would not forget their dead. You decided that one of the candles was for you, and you watched it burn all the way down while you waited for Aradia to notice you.

Nepeta sits in Terezi’s chair greasing the hinged parts of her claws, her other sets of brass knuckles laid out on the table gleaming from over-rubbing, and casts watery glares at the door every time she finishes a knuckle-bolt, like she can summon Terezi with stubbornly stifled sniffling. Aradia stares into the hearth, ignoring them.

They can’t live here forever. Kanaya makes lists, rosters, and rules as if tabulating the time that remains will increase it. She has taken the patrol roster down from above the hearth, but she hasn’t changed it yet.

They’re all waiting patiently for grief, except Kanaya, who’s missing the piece of her gut which would burn with acid. It’s replaced with mucous scaffolding and a different sort of flesh, propping up all the organs she’s missing. The rainbow drinker in her doesn’t mind Terezi’s absence. You can hear it, not hungry or directly threatened, content to glow dimly through Kanaya’s skin in the dull evening light that sneaks in through the boarded-up window.

She could cut herself on the edge of Nepeta’s claws, or jostle her tea so it spilled down her front, and the rainbow drinker would rise. You could rile it, perhaps; it is at the edge of your abilities to do so. The waiting would end in a blaze of glory, and machine gun-granted finality. But it would not be a reasoned end, and you are waiting for something else.

A few blocks away a bass amp kicks up, and the high wail of trance-pop lyrics hits the cellar loud enough to make even Aradia look up. Cerulean kids out slumming in the no-fly zone, courting highblood-appropriate wrist-taps from the judiciary system. The music sounds like sirens, or like the shrill scream of psionic dampers. Nepeta snaps up out of her chair so she can pace around the table.

Aradia’s awareness shifts back to the room, eyes following Nepeta, blithely unaware that she’s acting pale as porcelain.

“We’re almost out of grubflour,” Kanaya says loudly, pretending to stare worriedly at the cabinets behind her. “We should make a list, and start thinking about supply runs.”

Nepeta groans and flops down onto the floor. Aradia relaxes; chores are a safe topic. “I don’t want to make a list,” Nepeta says. “Tell us something cool about grubs instead, maybe we can make our own stupid flour.”

“There are eleven official brood-planets,” Kanaya says, dutifully. Nepeta perks up, pleased to have masterfully changed the subject. “Several per galaxy cluster, to save transportation costs on ascension and to protect against invasion.”

“Tell us something _cool_ ,” Nepeta says. “Everybody who did their schoolfeeds knows that. What are Troll-twinkies actually made out of?”

“Forty-two percent sugars, twenty-one percent complex carbohydrates and eleven percent fat by weight,” Kanaya says, “and don’t pretend you completed your schoolfeeds, feral child.”

Nepeta grins. “How many planets are there in the empire?”

“Eight thousand, seven hundred and two, that pay taxes,” Kanaya says.

“What about the ones that don’t pay taxes!”

“If you do not pay taxes, you are not part of the empire.”

Nepeta rolls her eyes. “Yeah, but what about them?”

“There are an awful lot of backwater moons,” Kanaya says, “and on some of them there aren’t even any seadwellers, just bluebloods and teals, and all of those ones are old. Their taxes will not pay for the ships to collect them and no empress lacks for thrift when it comes to taxes. They have no children; no taxes, no ships of young pupa. Soon their planets will be dead, and even the ghosts will leave.”

“How come the empress makes sure everything sucks?” Nepeta asks, but Kanaya shushes her.

“When you spend a hundred sweeps staring down the barrel of extinction, you get creative. The jadebloods know that in every clutch or so, the mothergrub picks an egg and she keeps it warmer than all the rest, which means that eventually that troll will hatch with wings. That troll will someday molt into a new mother, on one of the eleven brood-planets. Every one of us could have been a mothergrub, if we had hatched differently.

“On the right planet, given long enough with no taxes, after the empress forgets about the planet and treason means something different, they will give an adult troll just the right hormones, and she will molt with wings like she had hatched warm.” The story fills up the cellar and makes it home. It makes you see the well-thumbed pulpy romance novels under Nepeta’s chair, covers edited with raucous colors, instead of the cold that seeps in through the concrete floor. When you look down at your hands you see a shimmer of well-polished claws, painted in your moirail’s color, instead of raw and bleeding fingertips.

Kanaya stops, because Aradia is standing, staring at the door like a sentinel.

“What?” Kanaya asks, and the cellar is chilly and damp again.

 _1’M HOM3_ , Terezi says, her ghost’s shoulders hunched up against the lack of welcome. Her voice hisses and pops over her vowels, and she’s got blood trickling down one horn and pooling in her ear, but she is otherwise whole. _1’M HOM3, STOP 1T,_ she says, more quietly, and then she sniffs at you and your messed-up horns and she says _OH._

“Terezi is here,” Aradia says. “She’s dead.”

 _WH4T 4 DUMB W4Y TO D13,_ Terezi says. _1 D1DN’T 3V3N KNOW WHO 1T W4S._

You laugh, harsh, and Aradia flinches. _They’re all dumb ways to die,_ you say, and Terezi nods.

Kanaya’s dropped her head to her hands and wrapped her fingers around her horns, a simple ritual of mourning. She’ll watch all her friends die, over and over again, until her artificially long years are spent and the rainbow drinker is all that’s left. _Would you take her place?_ you ask Terezi.

 _R4TH3R NOT,_ Terezi says. _S33MS L1K3 K1ND OF 4 DR4G, FROM TH1S 4NGL3. 1T’S 34S13R TO B3 R3M3MB3R3D._

 _Not really,_ you say. You recall knowing what your horns looked like, and when you remembered your name. Easier is relative. _You should go._

Aradia sucks in a long, shaking breath, but Terezi says, _1N 4 L1TTL3._

They’ll stay a while longer here, you think, to be where Terezi was alive. Kanaya will make new rules, better rules, and it will be seasons or even sweeps before the empire pries them out of hiding.

“What happens, on the planet with a new mother grub?” Nepeta asks, twisting her claws together, pinching hard enough to draw olive blood to the surface. She is not looking at Aradia, not following Aradia’s gaze to search the empty air for Terezi. She’s still riveted on Kanaya. “What’s the end?” Nepeta asks.

It’s just pretend. Kanaya has done some statistical handwaving and some developmental guesswork and spun a sugary fairy tale. You are too bitter and too distant and far too dead for fairy tales so it doesn’t matter how it ends, but it hurts when Kanaya says, without lifting her head from her hands, “The slurry mixes a new rainbow, and out hatches a brood of free trolls. And the planet lives.”

 

 

*


End file.
